Territory is a terrestrial part subject to appropriation, and this is always the result of an intervention by a specific organism, capable of imposing its vital force upon any other form and force of life present in the same geophysical environment. Despite the impossibility of clearly differentiating between the various vital expressions — here designated as agents of territorialization — and despite the impossibility of definitively distinguishing between human and non-human agents, the territorializing force of the human species is today almost absolute and effectively unmatched by any other organic form.
Even if one were to consider the existence and biotic activity of single-celled beings as the original force and fundamental balance of all other organisms on Earth — as well as the microbiome of the human organism itself — it is not possible to compare this agency with the invasive and predatory activity of the multicellular organisms designated as human. While microbes have sustained and proliferated the vital process since the dawn of life on Earth, the human species is ultimately more akin to viral molecules, which invade a specific territory to appropriate its vital resources with the sole purpose of replicating with maximum efficiency and transmitting their genetic information to another territory before completely destroying the invaded and occupied body. This scenario, however, manifests in highly complex forms when it comes to culturally and socially organized groups, tribes, and peoples.
The occupation of a certain territory by a specific group and the appropriation of its animal, plant, and mineral resources is always intimately linked to and dependent on an ethos — a specific way of inhabiting — sustained by a right or a violation of a right rooted in some temporal-historical event. In the context of the modern era and, more generally, in the context of historically documented civilizational processes, territory is primarily a geographically circumscribed place, with more or less fixed boundaries and always in sharp contrast to other equally dominated and circumscribed spaces. These territories are continually in dispute, subject to territorializing, deterritorializing, and reterritorializing activities, such as, for example, due to climatic and purely natural causes or due to purely social occurrences, such as marriages, contracts of association and dissociation, or wars.
The territorialization or appropriation of land, however, reached a scale completely unknown in the modern era, particularly with the so-called discovery of the transatlantic lands known as the New World, the West Indies, or the Americas. With the dawn of mercantilism began the radical colonization of territories considered uninhabited, in the sense that the indigenous peoples of these other lands were deemed to have neither the capacity nor the right to inhabit their own territories, since, in the colonizers’ view, they neither behaved nor appeared as humans, but rather as ‘mere’ animals. These territories, labeled on old maps as ‘unknown lands’ or ‘white spots,’ thus became veritable ‘black holes’ for their original inhabitants — territories increasingly uninhabitable because they were expropriated and devastated by the new invaders.
The concept of territory thus reveals itself as a complex concept that transcends a mere geographical and material meaning, devoid of any atmospheric and immaterial sense. Despite its cultural, historical, and political constitution, territory coincides in certain aspects with the inconsistency and inconstancy of landscapes that are constituted through communion with the multiple human and non-human bodies traversed and populated by them. These landscape-territories possess inextinguishable ties to the specific vital and spiritual emanations manifested since time immemorial, thus safeguarding memories that will never be fully accessible, much less to completely materialistic and predatory invaders. The infinite ensemble of terrestrial territory-landscapes forms that organism called Earth, which, in its visible and invisible stratifications, will never be mapped by our species, which in the future will be just another trace among so many countless vanished footsteps.
Dirk Michael Hennrich